Holes in the City: A Doughnut Map for New York

The neighborhood around Print‘s New York offices, in the no-man’s land between Kips Bay and Murray Hill, has plenty of charms: cheap soup and spendy coffee, all manner of South Asian cuisine, a hotel that’s lousy with paparazzi, a lunch counter that serves pig’s heads, and the city’s most ornery watch repairman. One omission: a decent doughnut shop.

How do I know for sure? In the New York Doughnut Map, a handsome and useful pamphlet just published by the Brooklyn-based All You Can Eat Press, there’s a gaping hole where our mid-afternoon sugar source should be. (To be fair, the map includes Koryodang, in nearby Koreatown, but since the bakery serves a rice-flour-based confection instead of the usual wheat, I’m not counting it.) Written by Yuki Matsuo, with a sparkling throwback design by Jim Datz (complete with wax-paper bag), the map recounts the history of the doughnut and plots 35 favorite shops, sorted thematically from old school (Peter Pan: “No doughnut story is complete without this beloved New York institution”) to new wave (Dough: “A big player in the Brooklyn doughnut boom”).

You can pick up your own copy and sample some local doughnuts at the release party tomorrow night night (Thursday, October 11) at Project No. 8, at 22 West 29th Street near Broadway. Information design has rarely been so delicious.